logic

Within the categorical syllogism, ordinary language represents the ordinary flow of inference. Two premises are given; there is a plash of insight, and one step undertaken. The mind hops right along, not quite knowing where it is going but getting there nonetheless. On the right, a checklist does its work. The logician's clamp retains its force of old, but the inferential steps involve no more than the substitution of symbols for symbols, with the anchor of inference embedded in identities. Inference now proceeds from one identity to the next; no plash of insight is involved, only the solid satisfying ratcheting sound of symbols being substituted for symbols.

David Berlinski

Source: The Advent of the Algorithm: The 300-Year Journey from an Idea to the Computer, Pages: 10

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.

SETH said: Logic deals with exterior conditions, with cause and effect relationships. Intuitions deal with immediate experience of the most intimate nature, with subjective motions and activities that in your terms move far quicker than the speed of light, and with simultaneous events that your cause and effect level is far too slow to perceive.

"If we limit ourselves to thinking in terms of realities, facts, and knowledge, we have got the future all wrong because it is made, not of certainties, but of dreams. The future does not exist in the physical world but is present in our thoughts and dreams only....Far too many companies search for the future in the rear-view mirror, because that is where certainties are found. There we find the part of reality that can be verified. The strict scientific model of logic is a trap that prevents us from looking ahead."

Rolf Jensen

Source: The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from Information to Imagination Will Transform Your Business, Pages: 24

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent’s friends) they’ve probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)

Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. “You don’t really think that do you?” or “Well if you knew the <insert obscure reference here> rule/law/corollary you wouldn’t say such things”), they’re never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare: a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessiveness about being right is strong enough, they’ll reject those people out of hand before they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs, spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their psyche (and often, their misery).

I believe that we are neither a "self" nor "not a self," but that we are awareness residing as a body. This is the sort of apparent paradox about who we are that may not be solvable within the framework of what we call "Aristotelian two-valued logic" -- the logic system basic to all of Western analytical thought. In the two-valued logic, we frame our reality with questions like "Are we mortal or immortal?" "Is the mind or soul part of the body?" or "Is light made of waves or particles?" But none of these have "yes" or "no" answers. The exclusion of a middle ground between the poles of Aristotelian logic is the source of much confusion. Other logic systems have been suggested in Buddhist writings; the great second-century dharma master and teacher Nagarjuna introduced a four-valued logic system in which statements about the world can be (1) true, (2) not true, (3) both true and not true, (4) neither true nor not true -- which Nagarjuna believed was the usual case -- thereby illumination what is known as the Buddhist Middle Path. According to Nagarjuna, the Buddha first taught that the world is real. He next taught that it is unreal. To the more astute students, he taught that it is both real and not real. And to those who were furthest along the path, he taught that the world is neither real nor not real, which is what we would say today.

. . . The slogan "You are entitled to your opinion" is so often repeated that is near impossible for the brain of a modern Westerner not to have absorbed it.

Like many other views that have at times enjoyed universal assent, however, it isn't true. You don't really have the right to your own opinions. And the idea that you do, beside being false, is forever being invoked when it would be irrelevant even if it were true.